Art helps transform outlook of county jail inmates

Sunday

Dec 15, 2013 at 2:00 AMDec 15, 2013 at 10:19 AM

Fred Lamarne said he's traveled to almost every continent on the globe during a 12½-year stint with the British Army. But on Friday, Lamarne was locked up in the county jail, in a room with seven other convicted inmates using children's scissors and glue sticks, to make postcards to themselves with wishes for their own futures.

Elizabeth Dinan

Fred Lamarne said he's traveled to almost every continent on the globe during a 12½-year stint with the British Army. But on Friday, Lamarne was locked up in the county jail, in a room with seven other convicted inmates using children's scissors and glue sticks, to make postcards to themselves with wishes for their own futures.

Lamarne cut photos from donated magazines of a gourmet meal, a man swinging a club on a golf course, a cruise ship, people kayaking in a river, and a Range Rover. He glued them to the front of a postcard-sized piece of poster board and on the back he wrote the following message to his future self: "Enjoy your freedom."

The postcards were an assignment given to the inmates by Rockingham County Department of Corrections mental health counselor Jessica Salas during an art therapy program she launched about a year ago. Now there's a waiting list of inmates who've asked for the privilege of attending Salas' group art therapy sessions, when music is played on a worn boom box and dreams are scribbled on the backs of handmade postcards.

A high-energy graduate of the University of New Hampshire, with a master's degree in counseling, Salas is tasked with providing counseling and mental health resources for an inmate population averaging 400 a day. She does case management, individual therapy, anger management programs, provides court testimony and helps plan for inmates' lives after jail.

Salas started the art therapy classes in September 2012 while wondering, "What if we could get them to talk about their feelings, while doing something creative?"

Fifteen months later, Salas said she's been thanked many times every day on the job.

"The amount of gratitude I get is amazing," she said. "What other job do you get 20 people thanking you every day?"

None of the eight inmates at Friday's jailhouse art therapy session seemed to mind that a Lenny Kravitz CD kept skipping in an old boom box Salas found to provide background music.

"Everyone wants to be in this class," said prisoner Niko Nachef. "This is the place to be. It's very positive."

Nachef cut a photo of a beach from a magazine for the postcard he made to his future self. Next to it was the word "enriching" he cut from an advertisement.

Salas told the inmates that if they were "stuck" without a message to write to their future selves, to think about "what would push you past stuck?"

"Would it be freedom? Love?" she asked.

"The key to the door to this place," Lamarne said, launching a unanimous round of belly laughs.

Inmate Jason Brunelle glued photos to paper while lauding the art therapy program because "it's about yourself, instead of other people telling you what to do."

"Just that music right there, that's a beautiful thing in itself," he said.

Across the table, inmate Jeremy Joslin said the art therapy meetings "relax me."

"I don't feel like I'm in jail for this hour," said Joslin, who said he's also worked with Salas in an anger management program. "I learned a lot about myself with her."

Nachef said, "I haven't had any negative thoughts" since he entered the small room inside the jail and started making his beach-themed postcard.

"I look forward to it every week," he said.

Nearby, Tim Rioux found a magazine with cover-to-cover photos of high-performance cars. He cut out one for the front of his postcard and on the back he wrote to his future self "not to come back here." Rioux made a second card with sailboats on the front and on the back he stenciled the message, "I wish to be back in the sun."

"I like it to get off the (cell) block," Rioux said of Salas' art program. "It takes your mind off things."

Inmate Sammy Sclafani flipped through magazines and with the small, round children's scissors, he cut out the words and phrases "ambitious," "a new way," "discover small joys" and "stay extraordinary." He glued them to a piece of paper around a note to himself that read: "Dear Sammy, Your (sic) a great person. Stay positive and keep positive people around you. You will succeed in everything you do. Love, me."

Salas collects the magazines from her hairdresser, a neighbor and her mother, and brings them to the county jail for the inmates to borrow, then use for art projects.

Her old yogurt containers are reused by prisoners to mix paint and glue, while cardboard tubes from toilet paper and paper towels were most recently used by inmates to make Christmas ornaments. Other ornaments were made from donated Scrabble game letters and bottle caps, while snow globes were made from recycled salsa jars.

The ornaments were sold at a craft fair at the adjacent county nursing home and the proceeds were donated to the nursing home, Salas said.

"Every other week we make something to keep, then something to give back," she said. "We talk about gratitude."

At the end of her art therapy sessions, Salas asks her inmate students to write words on adhesive-backed pieces of paper to describe, "What stuck with you today?" Recent inmate responses included, "friendship," "family" and "desire to be sober 4ever."

Salas invited the prisoners in Friday's art class to write their addresses on the backs of their postcards with a promise that she'll mail them in a year.

"I'm going to still be here in a year," she said. "Wouldn't it be interesting to hear from yourself in a year?"

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